Broken

by A. E. Rought

  I love the sound of it, but have to tease. “Staking claim, huh?”

  “Wait till Monday,” he says.

  The hot shivers spread inward when he kisses my neck, just below my ear, and traces lingering kisses down to the neckline of my shirt. I’m going to go nuclear soon, bounce off the walls and land in his lap.

  Eventually, the DJ has mercy and plays a slow set. Alex weaves with innate grace through the empty spaces toward center floor. I surrender to the pull between us, and wrap my arms around him. Heat builds, dancing with the electricity he puts off like a Tesla Coil. One hand plants firmly on my hip, the other strokes over my hair. His skin is warm, heart beat drumming in my ear. I could live forever in this dance. But eventually the set ends, and the tempo picks up again.

  Back at the tables, Jason motions for Alex to meet him above the table, then shouts loud enough I can hear him anyway. “Wanna shoot some pool?”

  Alex replies, “Sure!”

  “The girls can try, too. We’ll play doubles.”

  Try? The girls can try? Daniel and I spent almost every weekend at the bowling alley just to play pool. His cousin Gavin ran Starlight Lanes and let us play for free. Jason saying I can try to play was like saying a cat can try to scratch you. Jason takes Bree’s hand and that same flash of real emotion lights her face like blacklight on neon.

  I’m sure when Alex laces his fingers in mine, I have the same look.

  We follow behind the guys and down into the sunken, normally-lit pool room. Half-walls cordon it off from the rest of the club, and baffles come down from the ceiling leaving four foot window-like openings into DarkHouse. The separating affect also cancels some of the noise and makes conversation possible.

  “You need help picking a cue?” Jason asks

  “No.” Okay, so it came out a little snotty. He doesn’t know who he’s patronizing. I twist my hair into a swift, messy bun knowing full-well Alex will just pull it out, but when I get serious, the hair has to go up. Eyes follow me as I walk to the rack of pool sticks, test a few, and choose one with decent balance and weight to it. “Who’s breaking?”

  “Depends on who’s racking,” Alex says.

  “You rack ‘em, we crack ‘em.” Jason cavalierly takes a cue from the wall and stands by Bree.

  Alex drops quarters into the table, then puts the colored balls on the green felt top. My brace hinders making a tight rack. He helps me align them in the triangle, then slides behind me running his fingers down my arms to my hands. Every muscle in my body tenses, and I think my heart rate races past heathy levels. The rocking motion he uses brings flames to my cheeks, and a titter to my racing heart.

  “Helping because of the brace,” he says, but the warmth from his legs against mine says he’s willing to help with a lot more.

  Jason’s break is sloppy, the white cue ball eventually knocking in a solid and a stripe. “Choose,” he says and points at me. Bree watches me pace the table perimeter, knowing my game and how much trouble they’re in. The smile on her face when I choose solids says she’s good with it, too. Ball after ball smacks the back of the pocket and drops into the tracks underneath. Jason starts fidgeting. Alex leans back against a post.

  With only one solid ball left, I miss a pocket.

  “Jeezus,” Jason groans. “You didn’t tell me you’re a pool shark.”

  “Oh, yeah!” comes an annoying, familiar voice from the steps. “Emma’s got skills when it comes to playing with balls.”

  Josh Mason strides up to the table. He’s wearing a sad attempt at Alex’s style of clothes, only all in shades of ugly: dark jeans, red shirt, off-white hoodie—hood down, cuffs up and the neckline showing his ugly red chest hair. Alex bristles, fingers tightening around the pool cue. He’s around the table in an instant and standing beside me.

  “Apologize,” Alex says in a growl.

  “It’s okay,” I say, sliding closer to my ‘guard dog’ as Josh had called him. “Josh is just jealous because I’m playing with you, and he’s used to me busting his balls.”

  Angry spots of red flush Josh’s cheeks. “You are such a bitch, Emma. I don’t know why I bothered.”

  “Why you bothered to what?” I sling back. Alex strong-arms me behind me. Trying to move him is like fighting with a wall. “Why you didn’t bother to be decent? Didn’t bother to respect me? Didn’t bother to catch your best friend when he fell?”

  “Screw you, Gentry!” He barks and storms closer. He’s chest-to-chest with Alex now and pushing to get past to him. He pokes a callused finger at my face. “You have no idea what I did that day!”

  “You two fought. I went for help. I came back just as Daniel fell.” I drop my voice to tones of acid, spewing the truth I’d kept bottled for months. “And you let him.”

  Josh’s hand pops up, nearly smacking Alex. His muscles tense in front of me and I know he’s going to do something, use one of his martial arts move on Josh. The redhead stumbles back a step when Alex shoves him and slides into a wider stance with his feet. I step to his side, watching Josh warily. He’s a contained storm, ready to split and destroy.

  “You let him fall, too,” Josh says, spittle flying from his lips.

  It’s too much. How dare he? The barb hits my heart like I’m sure Josh intended. I snake around Alex, and slam my braced right hand into Josh’s face. I feel the crack, and hear it too. White-hot pain flares in my hand and I know I’ve rebroken it. Josh slams into the pool table behind him, eyes glazed and mouth dangling open. He comes to quickly, focusing a scathing glare on me.

  “Go to hell, Josh Mason.”

  “I’m already there. Been there since the day I met you!”

  Moving my fingers in the brace rekindles all the hell I’d put there two weeks ago. I wince, and draw my hand to my chest. Josh lunges forward and Alex reacts. He grabs a fist full of Josh’s sweater, and sweeps his feet out from under him. The jerk drops hard on his rear, spitting cusswords and dribbling blood from the lip I split open again.

  Bree swears, calling Josh every horrid name she can think of. Jason has her hand and pulls her back.

  Bouncers pour down the stairs. The biggest one hauls Josh up from the floor and traps him in a bear hug. Josh, struggling and shouting nasty cusswords, digs in his heels as the bouncer drags him backward toward the rear exit. Foul words fly from Bree, Jason restraining her while two other burly guys step between us. I stand in hollowed-out shock. Josh said I let Daniel fall. He was already over the railing, I couldn’t have helped him, but God the pain and guilt geyser up anyway.

  The Bull Ring guy from the door crosses his arms and says in a solemn, seen-it-too-many-times voice, “You four are gonna have to leave.”

  Bouncers flank our exit from DarkHouse, and a waitress runs a bag of ice to me for my hand. On the way to the parking lot, Jason mutters, “That guy likes to ruin nights.”

  “And ruin lives,” I huff.

  The pain is undercutting my temperament, cleaving away my calm and manners. I cling to Alex and fight tears. Josh’s hateful words keeping whispering through my mind, and I know if he was here, I’d punch him again, then kick him when he was down.

  At Jason’s beat-up Ford Bronco, Alex releases my hair from the bun, pulling his finger through the blond strands before sweeping a kiss across my lips. The sight of his car and knowing he’s leaving scrapes me raw somehow. How could I have come to need him so quickly like my hand needs the brace to keep it steady? “Go to the clinic,” he says, “and get your hand taken care of.”

  “Yessir,” I pout. The last thing I want after sneaking out, and lying by omission to do it, is call my mom. Telling her I rebroke my hand by punching Daniel’s old best friend in the nightclub I wasn’t supposed to visit is going to send her over the deep end. I’m not even sure what punishment she’ll wield—it’s sure to be big, nasty and thorny.

  “Monday will be better,” he promises.

  “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “A pla
ster cast?” Bree asks, eyeing the new hardware on my right arm with pity.

  “Yeah.” I cast a glance at the hot pink painted cast on my right hand, then across the quad. Scudding clouds cast choppy darkness on the ground. People kept to the shadows beneath the catwalk, faces turned skyward, waiting. “Apparently, rebreaking your hand while in an immobilizer is a bad thing.”

  “Considering the silence since we dropped you off,” she says and sips her chai tea, “I’m guessing you’re grounded?”

  “Totally.” A far off rumble promises to deliver on the thunderstorm the weatherman forecast this morning. “Within an inch of my life, as my mom put it. No cell phone, no overnights, no homework at your house. Just school and home for the next month.”

  A delicate shudder ruffles Bree’s denim and white outfit. “Harsh.”

  “More like slow murder.”

  “She didn’t take into consideration that Josh is a Class A asshole and deserved to get punched?”

  “Oddly enough…” I pause and let out a sigh when I see Alex at the Walk-Up Window of Mugz-n-Chugz. “The cast and me punching Josh isn’t why I’m grounded. Alex showed up at the clinic and explained how horrid Josh was. Mom’s pissed because we went to DarkHouse.”

  “There goes next weekend’s plans.” She gives me a wink. We both knew there was a high possibility of me getting grounded—we went anyway. Next weekend was never an option. “So they’re okay with the new boyfriend, and the fact that he was there at DarkHouse, too?”

  “Thanks to Alex…” I wave when he leaves Tiny’s Walk-Up window. “My parents think he was there to protect me.”

  “Oh, sure.” An Olympic eye-roll flashes silvery eyeshadow at me. “That slow dance, with his hands all up in your hair and grazing your butt was for protection…”

  “Of course it was,” Alex agrees, appearing from Mugz-n-Chugz, his long fingers wrapped around a cup I know has breve in it. “Best way to guard her body was to keep a firm grip on it. Look what happened when I let go of her for a couple of minutes. She slugs Joshhole.”

  Bree bursts into giggles at the combination of Josh’s name with the way he was behaving. I don’t get a chance to giggle. Alex takes my coffee, slips an arm behind my back and drags me to him.

  “There are rules about PDAs,” Bree warns.

  Public Displays of Affection have earned suspensions at Shelley High before. Alex chuffs a breath between a laugh and a snort, like silly school rules don’t affect him, and lifts me off my feet. Bright pink cast trapped between us and my shoes dangling above his, Alex back-walks to the curb where he steps down into the street.

  Tingles course my skin, tickle my lips when he tips his face within kissing distance.

  My cast is in the way, and I don’t mind. Close isn’t enough with Alex. I lean up, a jolt of energy coursing through me when I press my mouth to his and nip his bottom lip. Pressure squeezes the air from my lungs when a sound between a sigh and a groan escape Alex, and he crushes me to him.

  Then my good mood chokes and dies on the fog of car exhaust.

  A roaring engine precedes Josh’s slur about whores and payment. Alex breaks our kiss, cuts a glare in Josh’s direction, and whispers, “Best revenge is a better boyfriend.”

  “Then I’m getting the best revenge of all.”

  Standing close to Alex, I know electrical energy when I feel it. When the hair on my arms and neck stands, I know it’s seconds before the storm hits. Then, lightning rips down into the quad, and a clap of thunder tears open the gray skies.

  “We need to go in.” I say. “We’ll get soaked.”

  And the rain starts. By the time we’ve made it to the shelter of the side door, the sky tears open and rain sheets down in earnest. Alex opens the door and ushers me in. The halls teem, people pushing, jostling and shouting. Then life grinds to a halt, all eyes on us as we walk into the main hall, hand-in-hand. Alex eats it up, looping an arm over my shoulders and pulling me to his side. He nods at guys too busy staring to nod back, and ignores the petulant lip-puffing pouts from the girls.

  “By the way,” he says, “my dad called the school and insisted my schedule get changed.”

  “What?” I hate the note of panic in my voice. “Why?”

  “He didn’t feel classes with Josh,” his tone is a perfect mockery of his dad’s, “would be good for my academic career.”

  “Oh,” is all I manage around the sinking feeling in my gut. Will we have lunch together? What about Dune Eco? I’ll be alone with Josh in that class. My jaw clenches, and my fingers flex—then the fresh hell in my hand reminds me not to make fists and not to punch people…for a while.

  “Nice locker,” Alex says, a hint of teasing elevating his tenor.

  “You should know—you bought it. Did you also set the combination for the date we met?”

  The white scar near his eye flexes when he bats his eyelashes and makes an innocent face. “Who? Me?”

  “Yes,” I poke him with the index finger not trapped in a cast. “You.”

  “Are you always so persistent?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, Ms. Persistence.” He unclips the barrette holding my hair back, then runs his long fingers through the blond strands. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

  “Sounds great.”

  Mrs. Johnson’s Trig class is more of a pain than last week. Shockingly, people want to sign my hot pink cast, and Mrs. Johnson seems to have caved and purchased hearing aids. She narrows a glance at my cast, tsks through her teeth. Her shoulder blades chop and cut under her thick sweater, while she butchers the white board with ridiculously tough equations.

  Fifteen problems on the board later and the first cell phone goes off.

  “Sayer Thomas,” she says without turning around, “put that phone on my desk.”

  A collective gasp runs around the room, followed by furtive movements and sounds. Lots of people looking in their laps, none of them smiling, all of them turning off their phones. The rest of the class passes in a stunned, well-behaved silence. Second hour is taken up with more thunder, rain lashing the windows and a movie to round out our study of Gothic literature. How many times can I stand to watch Dracula in a week? The flickering light reflects from the surface of my cast and eventually lulls me to a doze. Mr. Hansen wakes me near the end, nudging me.

  “Pain killers can make you drowsy,” he says, then pats me on the back.

  The entire building’s lights flicker when I hit the second floor hall on my way to the catwalk between the main building and the gym complex. I brace myself for a run in with Daniel’s ghost, or Josh’s fiery other who haunted my dream. Instead I see Alex, standing halfway between the catwalk doors and the stairs, an obvious debate raging in him by the look in his eyes.

  “Hey,” I say, hurrying up to him.

  What’s wrong with him? The graveyard and deer are the only times I’ve seen him so unsettled.

  “That’s my line,” he says, voice husky, but eyes not quite in the moment.

  “What’s the matter?” The urge to touch him burns in me. His crossed arms hint it wouldn’t be welcome. “Lost?”

  “Not really. I know where I need to go, I just don’t like the options to get there.”

  “Where’s your next class?”

  “I have weight training.” He casts a nervous glance at the doors. “I just…don’t like the idea of that walkway.”

  “Don’t be silly.” I offer my left hand. “I walk it every day, and it’s way better than getting soaked in the downpour.”

  Everything in him tilts off-center, away from the lightning knifing through the doors. Then he threads his fingers through mine, and nods.

  “Do you have a fear of heights or something?” I ask. Valid question, seeing as I’m dating him now.

  “I never did before…” The doors wheeze inward, opening onto the catwalk, a tunnel through the storm. Wind and water heave to either side. “But this doesn’t feel right.”

  Tension heightens through his fingers wh
ere they wrap around my hand. Storm winds buffet the tunnel, and the floor lurches a little under our feet. At each end, the flexible buffer zones give with the force of the gust. The tension in Alex’s fingers increase to something closer to vice-grip than human. He stops moving and I have to pull to make him take a step.

  “Come on. Alex,” I huff and tug again. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m okay,” he whispers.

  No, he’s not. I can see the raw, damaged boy surfacing in him, pressing under his scars. We walk past a panel of glass, rain streaming down, and the sense of wrong often whispering from him turns to a shout.

  “Oh my God, Em.” Alex stops dead, voice gone guttural and grip gone way too tight.

  “What?”

  “Something’s wrong...” Alex’s face is ashen, his hand paws at his chest. What’s the matter with him? His gaze locks on the plummeting water. His hand fists in his sweater, right over his heart, like he’s trying to stop it. “Emma, help me.”

  “I’m right here.” I stroke his arm with my cast. “You’re fine.”

  “No I’m not.” Wind gusts shove against the glass walkway, and the catwalk heaves. Alex’s muscles clench, then his arms fly out like he’s fighting for balance. “Oh God! I’m gonna fall!”

  I catch his hand, and he jerks it away. His infectious panic claws at my chest, clenches around my throat. Alex slings a confused, terrified glance at me, but seeing me makes it worse. His eyebrows shoot up, his mouth stretches in a silent scream and Alex staggers backward, arms flailing.

  Daniel’s last moments flash in my mind. If it wasn’t for the physical differences between Alex and him, I’d swear I was watching Daniel fall to his death again.

  My heart rate ratchets up. Tears tighten my windpipe.

  How can this be happening? I shake my head, letting the tears fall. It’s a losing battle when I’m trying to keep two people’s sanity. If I were alone, I’d fall apart. I reach for Alex again, his flinch only making my chest ache worse.